The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Big data intake and search systems typically store a large amount of data received from customers' systems. The data is made available to each customer for searching and analysis. The size of the customer's stored data increases the longer the customer stays with a data intake and search system provider. Data that is stale or not immediately needed consumes space in the provider's storage devices. This can escalate the cost to the customer because the customer pays the provider for the amount of storage required to store the customer's data. A typical solution is to periodically delete the older data. Unfortunately, the deletion of older data prevents the customer from searching and analyzing historical data.